AttenTION! Sjors777, up for some action

Recently I am more and more struggling with some softtilt. I tend to play a bit to long, especially when I am tired or something. Also, I’m plugging some small leaks, like calling to often on 3bets.

Hi,

That's very familiar problem

In theory, I suppose, lenght of session should be nearly 1-1,5 hours (average 1000-1500 hands). That's similar time like lessons in scool/college/university, when average person can hold highest concentration. And after this time we should "recharge" our "concentration".

And per day we could have 3-4 sessions with large and short breaks between it.

For the large breaks we could use eating, watching movies/soaps, some sport activity, hobbies, girls and etc.

For the short breaks I prefer use bath or shower. For me that's a fast way to recharge "concentration".

In this way you still could play 4-6k hands per hand, but with higher level of concentrating.

GL Sjors!

What do I struggle with?
1. Recently I am more and more struggling with some softtilt. I tend to play a bit to long, especially when I am tired or something.
2. Also, I’m plugging some small leaks, like calling to often on 3bets.

Hey Sjors777!

My name is Erik and I will be part of the coaching staff focusing on Tilt, A-Game, Mindset, and Lifecoaching. So if you have any questions I will have a thread up soon where you can easily let me know if you updated your thread with anything I might be able to help out with. I'll be trolling around the forums but just so i don't miss anything.

1. Can you be a bit more specific when you talk about soft tilt? How long are your sessions usually? After how long do your mind start to get tired? Are you taking breaks while playing? If yes what do you do during the breaks?

2. Is this an issue that is always a part of your game? Does it get worse in certain spots vs certain villains etc?

Cheers!

Hi Erik! good to have you around!

1) usually I try to close down te action within the 2hour mark. I do this, because I am sure that my game is best in this particulair period. Normaly my mind does net get tired very quick. This, however, depends very much on my further activities of the day. If I had a very exhausting day, my brain is likely to get tired within half a hour of playing poker. Somedays, on the other hand, i feel energetic after playing hours and hours of poker.

The biggest issue occurs when i notice that my brain gets tired and i am trying to shut down the action, but the tables are just to good and the fishes just to bad to leave. I am currently uncapable of leaving a table with a huge whale on my right side. So, after a couple hours i want to quit, but i don't feel like I can. After decreasing the numbers of tables to like 2-6 tables (normaly I play 6-10) I feel like getting bored. Especially when the fish is running hot, I add some more tables to prevent myself from falling asleep. At this point I am playing my normal volume, but my B-game.

Am I taking breaks? No, actually not. I always look for juicy tables, and once I found them I can't stop playing. Breaks feel like a -ev move, since the fish might leave while I am chilling

2) This problem has occured ever since I play NL50+. At nl25 it occured sometimes, but a lot less then nowdays. This is obviously because the fish is widely spread and easy to find at the micro's, but is hiding on no50 and nl100 and is like a needle in a hajstack on nl200. The latter limit I dont play because of this reason.

When I play my b-game (after I went over my session-length-limit) some spots can be expirienced very tilting. This can be a simple badbeat or sth. Surely some regs can easily get me on tilt after I played for 5 hours.

Some second minor tilt issue is the fact that, like once a couple weeks, I start playing when feeling sick, tired, bored, or something else -ev. Before playing I always feel like I'm going to lose some money and in the end this turns out to be the case very often. This sessions I should just avoid by playing only when feeling ok imo

Sorry for the wall and the late reply. I am currently on a skibreak and do not have a lot of time for surfing the web, since I rather ski the alpes

Hey there Sjors,

you have mentioned that you often have exhausting days. By eliminating those, your poker performance should be better :).

Can you please give me an overview of your:

1. sleeping (how much do you sleep, when do you sleep?)
2. nutrition (what and when do you usually eat?)
3. exercise (how often do you exercise and what exactly do you do?)
4. hydration (what do you drink and how frequently?)
5. recovery (do you have any recovering activities? if yes, which?)

Looking forward to hearing from you soon

-Primož

Originally posted by Schnitzelfisch
Hey there Sjors,

you have mentioned that you often have exhausting days. By eliminating those, your poker performance should be better :).

Can you please give me an overview of your:

1. sleeping (how much do you sleep, when do you sleep?)
2. nutrition (what and when do you usually eat?)
3. exercise (how often do you exercise and what exactly do you do?)
4. hydration (what do you drink and how frequently?)
5. recovery (do you have any recovering activities? if yes, which?)

Looking forward to hearing from you soon

-Primož

Hi!

Thanx for the help.

I would love to eliminate most of those days, but doing that would imply failing on college

1) On average probs 9 hours/day. My sleeping patterns are terrible. If I have an early class I go to bed at 0.00 in order to get ±7 hours of sleep. Effectively this is 5-6 hours, since I lie awake some time. If i dont have any lectures next day, I sometimes sleep 12 hours, or sometimes a bit less if i decide to grind at night.
I get most sleep between 1.00 ~ 9.00 I guess. When I'm exhausted this can variate between 22.00 ~ 13.00

2) I always eat breakfast. The time for this early meal variates a lot. I can eat breakfast at 7.00 in the morning, but it can be around 12.00 aswell. Breakfast = 2 slices of bread. I almost never skip lunch. Lunch is 2 slices of bread/ meal at univeristy (sandwiches) and once a week pizza or some other junk. Dinner is most of the times between 17.00 and 19.00. I define my dinner as quite healthy. I live at home, so most days my mother or dad cooks. No strange stuff here.
I try to avoid snacking in between meals, but in practise I eat on average 1 snack a day (some nutts, chocolate, cookie, etc.).
I eat fruit on daily basis (or I drink some substitute)

3) I play tennis on average 2 hours a week. In vacations this can get at 10 hours a week.
I consider myself healthy, I'm 1,85 ish tall and I weigh about 69kg's.

4) On average I drink 2 liters of fluid daily. Half of this is water. The other half is coffee, milk, juice and a glass of some junk soda (coke/fanta etc) I do think I drink to much coffee on stressfull days.

5) Sleep I use sport sometimes as recovery too. Sometimes I just surf the web after a session and some other times I watch some tv or read a book or sth. I dont have a particulair recovery activity.

Cherioo

Hey there again,

I love the effort you've put into answering these questions :).

Ok, there are a couple of things which you could improve:

sleep, nutrition and recovering activities.

But I don't want to just tell you to do this and that, I think it's better if we could find solutions together which would help you improve your lifestyle.

So, let's start with sleep. Have you ever tried sleeping consistently, for example 8 hours each night? If you love to sleep, that's probably one of the best solutions for you. You will still be able to sleep quite a bit, but because you will sleep a consistent amount of hours, you should be better rested than if you constantly sleep a different amount.

However, I would also like to offer you an alternative. Perhaps sleeping in a way that is mentioned in this article would suit your specific situation :)?

Ok, moving on to nutrition. Do you perhaps notice any difference in energy levels after you eat some junk, compared to when you eat a healthier meal (like meat + vegetables? If you don't know, you can perhaps try testing this in the next couple of days :).

Do you think that you could improve your nutrition in a way that it would provide you with more energy? Are there maybe some things that you want to change, but don't know how to? If you were to change your nutrition, where would you want to start?

When do you tend to drink the junk drinks? Why do you drink them? How do they make you feel? What do you think is the reason for the excessive drinking of coffee on stressful days? Are the days any batter after you've drank the coffee?

Ok, you've mentioned a couple of recovering activities. After which of them are you really fresh/recovered? Are there perhaps some of them that just help you take your mind away from poker, but still drain your overall energy?

Lots of questions, i know, but the more we know about you, the better we can help you ;).

-Primož

Hi

Sleep
I have never realy experienced succes in trying to sleep consistent amount of time. It might be an option to get a fixed amount of sleep. In practise this does not work for me. Sometimes i have obligations in the morning, but not feeling sleepy at night and therefore i miss a lot of sleep. Ofcourse, I could go to bed earlier, but then I always find myself lying awake for hours and hours (sometimes half the night). Currently I just sleep as long as feels right. A problem arises here; I sleep way to long and super inconsistenly. I think you are right that I should do something about this.

I've read the article, super interesting! I think I'm going to practice this method, with some adjustments, for a while and see how it fits me. Perhaps I am a bit less able to grind at night, since I wake up at a specific (early) time, but we'll see how it goes. I think I won't be able to put a fixed wakeup time for everyday in the week. 7ish would be oke for my early lectures, but this will certainly make me unable to grind late at night.

What do you think of the following plan?
♦ wake up between 7 and 9 o clock in the morning (prefixed before going to sleep)
♦ going to bed only when tired enough to fall asleep within a couple minutes.

I think this plan might enable me to grind late at night when I have energy, without totally disturbing my sleeping patterns.

Nutrition
I am certainly going to test how my energy levels are influenced by nutrition in the next days. Maybe I just eat junkfood one day, in order to feel the difference

I am actually pretty ok with my nutrition. Surely I would like to eat only proper food/drinks, but sometimes that seems very hard. Especially when I'm out or sth and everyone orders junkfood. Hmmm.
Maybe its a plan to stick with 3 healty meals a day and some fruit snack or something and just eat crap only when there is no other option I think this would be quite an improvement compared to the current situation.

I drink coffee when I'm tired. Since my sleeping patterns are a mess, I'm always tired = i always drink coffee :P. It makes me feel better for half an hour and then I need a refill It's amazing how productivity changes when I drink coffee on the shortterm. Sometimes when I get stuck while studying, I just make a 3-5 shot ristretto coffee and I get in some sicko concentration zone for the next 2 hours. Because it is so succesfull, I'm doing it a bit to much.
I think i will drink less coffee when my sleeping pattern improves. I won't entirely ban out coffee, but a major cutback is apropiate here. I'm going to aim for 2 cups a day for the upcomming week. In one week I will evaluate Maybe next week I cut back to 1 cup/day.

Recovery
Interestingly, activities that take my mind away from poker (like playing tennis), are indeed very succesfull recovery activities. Activities like watching tv, or sleeping feel quite less satisfying.

Thanx for your afford and I realy like all the questioning. Don't bother about the quanity I find it very interesting.

Ciaoo

Hey again,

I love the sleeping plan! Please let me know how it works out for you :). It might take a week or two to get used to it, so don't give up right away. But after two weeks, there should definitely be an improvement :).

I like the nutrition plan as well ♠_thumbsup:! Just a small hint: How about eating healthy before you want to be productive and not being so strict when you don't have to be productive (are out with friends or something similar) :)?

The coffee plan sounds fine to me as well. Perhaps coffee can be the cause of you laying awake for hours ;). See how it goes and then decide for yourself what is best for you.

You have grasped the point with the recovery techniques as well. I like the way you think yourself and your attitude towards testing and trying out different things. I'm sure that you will progress a lot in the near future!

Let me know how things go, and if you happen to stumble into any problems.

Take care!

-Primož

If you have a smartphone, then maybe the app "sleepcycle" is something for you.
This monitors the quality of your sleep every night and wakes you up at the moment when you are in a 'light' sleep fase.

Hi!

Thanx for your reply, I surely will let you know how it all turned out. Today I decided to wake up at my upper boundary, which was 9 o clock. I expected to be exhausted, since I was already tired yesterday and played for to long last night. However, I wasn't tired at all. Fine start imo

Your nutrition hint might come in handy. Im going to experience a bit with the method in the upcomming days.

I'll keep you posted!

@Luca
I just installed the app, I'll let you know how it turned out Thanx for the tip.

Oke, now it's time for some strategic implements. Upcomming month im going to take a 50/50 time distribution between theory and practise. This will imply a lot of studying. I'n not going to simply watch vid's and stuff, no, i'm going to work on particulair aspects through out the entire month starting tomorrow.

Some topics:

-Math; up from basic to advanced
-3bet+ ranges and balancing
-Agression improvements
-Balance postflop
etc.

Im going to monitor everything I study and keep you posted.

1) Somedays, on the other hand, i feel energetic after playing hours and hours of poker.

The biggest issue occurs when i notice that my brain gets tired At this point I am playing my normal volume, but my B-game.

Breaks feel like a -ev move

When I play my b-game (after I went over my session-length-limit) some spots can be expirienced very tilting.

2. I start playing when feeling sick, tired, bored, or something else -ev.

Hello again!

1. I would recommended having a solid Warm-Up routine that you do before every single session. It will make you more aware of your level of energy you have before a session, and you can start practicing setting a time limit on your session after that. If you notice in session after a while that you brain is tired and it takes you by surprise or so you know you didn't actively and consciously look into how you were doing before the session. If you try to fix the problem of a tired brain when its already tired in session, it's going to be so much harder to win the "fight". It comes with preparation and experience of preparation.

Breaks might a -ev or a +ev move depending on how tired you are in the session, how big the fish is and the quality of the other regs. The is a point where it goes from - to +. If you are tired and playing your B-Game you might be fine a s long as everything goes as it should but as you say your self that you are more susceptible to tilt at this point.

2. A Warm-Up routine helps making sure that this doesn't happen either.

If you feel you have a tired "overworked" brain I can highly recommend doing regular mindfulness and meditation exercises. It goes straight to the core of this issue. Of course we have to think about things every day. But removing negative repetitive thought patterns that just wastes energy, time, and focus will make the brain much more efficient. Quality over quantity so to say.

Cheers!

Hi Erik

Thanx for the advice!

1) Do you have any concrete tips for warm up exercises? How about doing 20 push-ups, or am I thinking the wrong way?
Setting a time limit before starting the session seems to make perfect sense, dnk why I never tried that before.

Im not sure about the break thing. I personally just don't like to play my b-game. I just don't enjoy it. I think breaking 2mins every hour is a +ev move, since this might prevent me from going into my b-game. If this does not work I should just quit the session imo. My expirience is that when I don't quit at this point, I'm very able of spewing away 5 stacks in 15 mins.

2) I like the idea. When im exhausted or sick, 20 pushups will be quite tough to accomplish. However, if im just feeling good, it won't be a struggle.

What do you mean with:

If you feel you have a tired "overworked" brain I can highly recommend doing regular mindfulness and meditation exercises. It goes straight to the core of this issue.

Do you mean stuff like dr kawashima braintraining? ♦

I actually do not have an overworked brain that much of the time. It's rather the opposite, my brain feels a bit on basic level sometimes. After some realy intensive thinking it may get fired up. Sometimes his just don't work, maybe because im tired and I might stick on the abc level. This might continu for a couple days actually, quite wierd Im not sure if this is just in my head, or if it is the truth. On the other had, I may go weeks and weeks without suffering this issue.

Maybe daily exercises could solve a lot. Could you give me some examples

Thanx in advance.

Originally posted by Sjors777

Thanx for the advice!

1. How about doing 20 push-ups, or am I thinking the wrong way?

2. Setting a time limit before starting the session seems to make perfect sense, dnk why I never tried that before.

3. My expirience is that when I don't quit at this point, I'm very able of spewing away 5 stacks in 15 mins.

4. I actually do not have an overworked brain that much of the time. This might continue for a couple days actually, quite weird I may go weeks and weeks without suffering this issue.

5. Maybe daily exercises could solve a lot.

My pleasure!

1. That could could be a part of the Warm-up yes. But I recommend you do them mindfully. Breath in 3-5 seconds on the way down and 3-5 seconds breathing out on th way up. try to keep your awareness on the breath if you can. But before you sit down make sure that you sit down with a purpose or session goal, maybe 3b defense or C-Betting, whatever you feel is the most important issue. or leak.

2. This can also be a part of your session goal. Estimate a time limit. And then set two alarms on at the estimated time limit and one that goes of every 15 minutes. Then every 15 minute you check in and see how you are doing. And adjust accordingly.

3. Use the stuff in Q.2 to try and address this issue..

4. Maybe you haven't had time to think about it enough so give it some time. But try to see if you can catch yourself lost in thought about stuff that A. Is a repetitive negative thought pattern. B. Worrying or thinking about things that are not relevant or that the energy you put on the is not in proportion to the actual issue. C. If you do catch your self doing this then see where your mind is at, in the past or in the future. You want it to be in the present moment focused on the task at hand most of the time.. Hope that gives you some inspiration on that...

5. I highly recommend that. Personally I got to the park with my Kettlebell every morning. i have found an exercise forum that i think is fun, so the exercise itself is just and added bonus you could almost say. The only bad workout is the one you don't to basically. Make it fun

Nice to see you putting in the work!

Hi again

1) Oke than that is what i'm going to do in the present.The goal setting adivce is usefull. I already noticed myself being way more aware and focused when I set a goal in the past, but never thought of it as something I should do every session. From now on I will. Maybe the goals are sometimes not that challenging, but I think the fact that I do set a goal will keep me focused.

2) Also a very good tip. Definately going to implement this!

3) Oke:) Think that having the alert makes me more aware in the case this issue might occur.

4) I do recognize myself in some of the stuff that you describe. For example; my computer is having some issues. A couple days ago I figured I would be best of by reinstalling it. Turns out I lost some files, not very important ones, but still some nice thing. Last 2 days I'm quite frustreated because of this, wile actually I should not care that much imo. Definately my mind is sometimes a bit stuck in the past. When I play poker I don't feel this way, but I think it does influences my game and increases the chance of tilting.
It's very difficult for me tot define the problem. I've always seen myself als quite bright and capable of figuring things out by myself, but still I'm sturggling with some negative patterns. Don't realy know how to solve this., but I'm going to think about it.

5) Yes I realy should I think I'm a bit to lazy sometimes. Not as lazy as the avg pokerplayer i suppose, but still to lazy. Workouts etc are also part of the plan I'm going to work out.

Thanx, and if possible I would like some further thought on point 4.

Ciaoo

Warmup excersise:
-20 controlled, steady pushups. Slow and steady breathing. (2mins)
-Take one minute of thinking about my state of awareness and state of mind.
-Make up a session goal (2-5 mins)
-Shut down useless programs (skype/browser), if needed clean workspace a bit. (2mins)
Total: 7-10 Minutes

Cooldown:
-Play guitar
-Sports
-Some kind of thinking (game)
Total: 10 Minutes+

Daily workout
-20 pushups, even if not playing a session
-……
-Walk the dog? ♦
Total: 15 Minutes

You're doing terribly well Sjors!!!

Thanx For the first time in months I actually spent more hours on study than on playing this week. I've only played like 5 hours, but been studing like 15 I think ♦ Interestingly, yesterday wile playing a small session, I felt like realy crushing and realy putting vil's on the right hands. Felt quite nice. After half an hour i slid back in my old game and quited the session